Embodiments herein generally relate to printing devices such as electrostatographic printers and copiers or reproduction machines, and more particularly, concerns a method of monitoring and reporting potentially faulty printed sheets.
In printing and copying systems, there is a system tradeoff between productivity and ensured image quality. Production systems may maximize image quality (at the cost of productivity) by shutting down the printing system when a potential problem has been identified, and requiring appropriate operator intervention at that point to resolve the condition. In this case, any potentially defective sheets are not delivered to the output stack, or are the most recently delivered sheets, making it easy for the operator to identify which sheets to inspect for potential defects. For example, see U.S. Patent Publication 2005/0185222 (incorporated fully herein by reference) which describes that if the integrity system finds that the sheets are out of order or missing, it stops the printer and a warning message on the integrity controller advises the operator of an integrity fault.
Production systems can also maximize productivity (at the potential cost of image quality) by only shutting down for physical component failures (jams, etc.), and automatically recovering from any other failures relating only to printing quality. In this case, it is possible that the system ‘knows’ that one or more delivered sheets may have some defects, but communicating the specific point in the output where the problem occurred is problematic. Current systems typically follow static rules to shut down if severe defects are detected. Some systems may post a message to the printer GUI indicating that print quality defects may have occurred (typically without indicating specific sheet(s) for these defects).